Following change in Twitter’s ownership and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was pursued by some. Our study looks at the dynamics of this migration. Utilizing publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period. Our analyses reveal significant challenges sustaining user engagement on Mastodon due to its decentralized structure as well as competition from other platforms such as Bluesky and Threads. The movement lost momentum after an initial surge of enthusiasm as most users did not maintain their activity levels, and those who did faced lower levels of engagement compared to Twitter. Our findings highlight the challenges involved in transitioning professional communities to decentralized platforms, emphasizing the need for focusing on migrating social connections for long-term user engagement.
To increase engagement, I propose we have some idiots volunteer to respond to every scientific article and achievement on Mastodon with ridicule and skepticism.
Oh, right. Like that’s gonna help. Pfft.
(How was that)
You’re perfect ❤️.
Nonsense. If they were perfect, wouldn’t they have used a question mark? Your judgement of character is laughable. What empirical evidence is there that they are perfect?
(How was that?)
Beautiful 😍.
“Hurt me, daddy.”
“OK, now you’ve made it weird.”
“Aw yeah, that’s the stuff.”
37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That’s ~90% who didn’t bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.
As much as people around these parts despise algorithmic feeds, I suspect an algorithmic feed would’ve worked far better in this situation to feed all academic based content to someone immediately on account creation if they show interest/ follow peers in the field.
This would’ve helped the migration since they most likely don’t know the accounts of the Twitter accounts posting academic content as that was algorithmically fed as well. I’m really doubtful it’s a problem with decentralization, seems to me mastodon had a problem with both not having a critical mass and the content that was there wasn’t easy enough to find.
I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.
Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.
For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there’s like… two active people specifically in my field.
Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I’ve been a fan of for years but that I didn’t even know was on there.
Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven’t seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.
I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.
Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.
I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.
The problem with comparing “engagement” across platforms is that it is never apples to apples. My experience on Mastodon has been that the engagement is lower in quantity, but much higher in quality. The number of meaningful and thoughtful engagements is much higher. The number of enduring connections is much higher.
If you want to interact with people who are seeking your exact content, if you want to build fidelity, if you want more meaningful comments and to build community, there is no better place I’ve found than Mastodon.
Social mass media favors “influencers” who create content that has broad appeal, but no depth or meaningful engagement, or else ragebait that attracts conflict and repetitive comments.
I don’t have experience with Twitter or Mastodon but it reminds me of time when I quit drinking.
When I quit drinking and tried to stay around people I used to drink with, I realized really fast how pointless this “engagement” (really just two people speaking past each other, and feeling like they have deep conversation) is. It’s almost insulting what a waste of effort such an “engagement” can be.
I have the same issue with Reddit, there’s a middle size good quality subreddit about my specific job which is the best place on the internet to see news and discussions about it in one place. It helps me increase and test my knowledge a lot.
Is there such a community here? Maybe you could start one.
I tried that. No one ever really joined. I tried posting content, and no one ever engaged with it.
Guess theres not many childcare educators on Lemmy as the reddit community is always super active.
I honestly wouldn’t expect to see a lot of that, being that in my anecdotal evidence the majority of K-12 educators would likely fall under a more generalized population, than what lemmy currently is, which is generally very technical and STEM oriented.
All the other subs on Reddit didn’t exist until general population got pulled in with memes, and started partaking in communities there. Lemmy is just like Reddit was, when Reddit was young.
Did you try promoting it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !parenting@lemmy.world ?
News, tech, left-wing politics, memes, anime, and porn are Lemmy’s biggest community types.
I know a lot of different subtopics fit under each, and I’m sure I left a few top level subjects out, but my point is that there are a lot of mid-sized, and especially smaller (by Reddit standards), subreddits that Lemmy is no where near being remotely useful as a replacement for yet.
I have community subreddit collections that I don’t see Lemmy replacing anytime soon. I mean, I hope they do. I still check every so often, and yes, communities for them exist and they have maybe a few dozen users, but not enough to even try to just suck it up and deal.
Hot take of the day: academia doesn’t need social media.
All fields need an information sharing platform. Historically, it was in person at conferences or conventions and such. Now it’s online and continuous.
Does it need to be online and continuous?
Yeah, I think that they do need a public and easily accessed place to present information, but I can’t for the life of me (per the article) see why engagement would matter much at all in that context.
It doesn’t need to exist at all. But being online and continuous obviously speeds communication.
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